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Ethical Online Learning

The first mistake of many online programs is that they try to replicate something we do in face-to-face classes, mapping the (sometimes pedagogically-sound, sometimes bizarre) traditions of on-ground institutions onto digital space.

We need to recognize that online learning uses a different platform, builds community in different ways, demands different pedagogies, has a different economy, functions at different scales, and requires different choices regarding curriculum than does on-ground education. Even where the same goal is desired, very different methods must be used to reach that goal.

Ethical Online Learning

1.
Ethical Online Learning
Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer

2.
Tools are made by people, and most (or even all) educational
technologies have pedagogies hard-coded into them in advance.
This is why it is so essential we consider them carefully and
critically—that we empty all our LEGOs onto the table and sift
through them before we start building. Some tools are decidedly
less innocuous than others.

4.
The Turnitin End-User Agreement is a blur of words and phrases
separated by commas, of which ‘royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide,
irrevocable’ are but a scary few.The rat-a-tat-tat of nouns, verbs,
and adjectives is so bewildering that almost anyone would blindly
click ‘agree’ just to avoid the deluge of legalese. But these words
are serious and their ramiﬁcations pedagogical.

5.
According to the company’s website,Turnitin has a “non-exclusive,
royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license” to more
than 734 million student papers.

6.
“Many of our colleagues are entrenched in an agonistic stance
toward students in the aggregate: students are lazy, illiterate, anti-
intellectual cheaters who must prove their worth to the instructor.
Turnitin and its automated assessment of student writing is a tool
for that proof.”
~ Rebecca Moore Howard

7.
Remote proctoring tools can’t ensure that students will not cheat.
Turnitin won’t make students better writers.TheVLE can’t ensure
that students will learn.All will, however, ensure that students feel
more thoroughly policed.All will ensure that students (and
teachers) are more compliant.

8.
When ourVLE or LMS reports how many minutes students have
spent accessing a course, what do we do with that information?
What will we do with the information when we also know the
heart rate of students as they’re accessing (or not accessing) a
course? How can teachers see courses as more than just a series
of tasks and see students as more than just rows in a spreadsheet?

9.
“Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in
the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of
the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and
appliances with which they are dealing.”
~ John Dewey, Schools ofTo-Morrow

10.
The development and dissemination of educational technology has
always had political, as well as practical, ramiﬁcations.

11.
The ﬁrst mistake of many online programs is that they try to
replicate something we do in face-to-face classes, mapping the
(sometimes pedagogically-sound, sometimes bizarre) traditions of
on-ground institutions onto digital space.

12.
We need to recognize that online learning uses a different
platform, builds community in different ways, demands different
pedagogies, has a different economy, functions at different scales,
and requires different choices regarding curriculum than does on-
ground education. Even where the same goal is desired, very
different methods must be used to reach that goal.

13.
“I would not like to be a man or a woman if the impossibility of
changing the world were something as obvious as that Saturdays
precede Sundays. I would not like to be a woman or a man if the
impossibility of changing the world were objective reality, one
purely realized and around which nothing could be discussed.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation

14.
When we teach an on-ground class, the room in which we teach
has been built for us in advance. Usually, it’s in a school, on a
campus, has chairs, desks, tables, windows, walls, a door. Sometimes
there’s a computer, a projector, a screen. Hopefully, the desks and
chairs are moveable and there are chalkboards on multiple walls.
When we enter these rooms, we still make intentional design
decisions. How will the chairs be arranged? What direction will we
face? Will the room have a front? Will we re-arrange from day to
day or maintain a consistent conﬁguration?

15.
Letting the default conﬁguration of a classroom dictate how we’ll
teach is to allow the bureaucratic trappings of schooling subsume
our pedagogies.

17.
When we teach online, we have to build the course and also the
classroom, the quad, the fountain, the ﬁeld, the student lounge, the
park benches.

18.
A good virtual learning environment is a tool that can help with
this process; however, we should never let its design decisions —
its architecture — dictate our pedagogies.

19.
Rather than simply transplanting the Lego castle of education from
one platform to another, we need to start dismantling it piece by
piece, examining those pieces and how they ﬁt together. Only then
can we reassemble the pieces thoughtfully inside the digital
environment. Nothing can be taken for granted.The course.The
degree.Accreditation.Assessment. Rubrics. Peer review.The power
dynamics of teachers and students.

21.
The internet didn’t invent collaboration or solve the problems of
institutional access, but it does allow for new forms of
collaboration and does bring educational opportunities to new
audiences. (In my own online classes, I’ve taught housebound
students, new mothers in rural areas hundreds of miles from a
university, and soldiers stationed abroad.)
OUR ASSUMPTIONS

22.
Technology is a pedagogical decision. Supporting innovative digital
pedagogies means hiring and creating a culture for the
development of digital pedagogues. Institutions shouldn’t
outsource online learning as a substitute for developing internal
expertise in and discussion about online learning.
EDTECH AND THE FETISHIZATION OF TOOLS

23.
The best online learning should engage us in an immediate and
physical way. Learning shouldn’t happen entirely at a desk.The best
online courses — the best courses of all types — ask students to
do work in the world (outside the classroom and outside the
virtual learning environment).
TIDY ONLINE / ON-GROUND DISTINCTIONS

24.
The semester.The quarter.The credit-hour.The module.We need
to devise learning activities that take organic (and less arbitrary)
shapes in space and time.We need to recognize that the best
learning happens not inside courses but between them.
THE COURSE

25.
Learning can not be reduced to or packaged as a series of static,
self-contained content. Rather, learning happens in tangents,
diversions, interruptions — in a series of clauses (parentheticals)
… and gaps.

26.
At many institutions there’s a problematic divide between those
building online courses and those teaching them.The voices of
authority should proliferate not congeal. Instructional designers
are teachers.Authors are teachers. Students are teachers.
AUTHORITY

27.
“Students come to learning, to those of us lucky to be their
teachers, with their stories.They hope for opportunities to share
them, and they hope too that we will understand the truth of their
experiences.”
~ Lora Taub,“Ethical Online Learning: Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice”

28.
We need to give students reasons less banal than points to do the
work of learning. For example, I tell the students in my classes,
“You should consider this course a ‘busy-work-free zone.’ If an
assignment does not feel productive, we can ﬁnd ways to modify,
remix, or repurpose the instructions.”
ASSESSMENT

30.
I say ignore “best practices” or “quality assurance” measures that
encourage us to drift away from the kind of trust and risk that
make learning ecstatic.The quality of learning is what we should
concern ourselves with, not whether we meet expectations too
often set before the arrival of students to our courses.As Sean
Michael Morris remarks, too many best practices,“guard us against
the incalculable difference of students we can’t see.”
QUALITY

31.
Don’t wield outcomes like a weapon. Online learning activities
should not be overly designed or too-strictly standardized.
Improvisation, play, and experimentation are essential to learning.
OUTCOMES

32.
These two words are, for me, fundamentally at odds.We need to
encourage sharing, remixing, and productive and creative forms of
plagiarism.This is how children learn language, and we don’t police
their plagiarisms.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

33.
Community and dialogue shouldn’t be an accident or by-product
of a course.They should be the course.
CONTENT

35.
Intellectual elitism. Anti-intellectualism. Gatekeeping. Online
learning should be more friendly, more collaborative, more open,
and more accepting.We need to create pedagogies of care online.
COMPETITION

36.
Educators at every level must begin by listening to and trusting
students.Teachers stand to learn more from students about online
learning than we could ever teach. Many students come to an
online or hybrid class knowing very well how to learn online, even
if they don’t always know how to learn in an online course.

37.
It’s often our failure to know as well how to learn online that
leads to many of the design mistakes in this generation of online
courses. Recognizing this demands a culture-shift — demands that
we acknowledge the diverse expertise of students as sometimes
tantamount to our own.